The IDF’s response to Naza ‘legalizes’ genocide

For the IDF, Naza – which gives voice to Israeli soldiers who took part in that greatest of crimes and witnessed it up close – opens up another arena of challenge: not a court but a public forum.

More than a denial, the Israeli army’s response to the documentary Naza amounts to an unsolicited exercise in legal self-defense. Faced with accusations that emerge from the testimony of its own soldiers, the IDF does not limit itself to disputing individual facts. In its long press statement, it builds up a barrier of legal categories to explain the genocidal violence it has unleashed on Gaza: “collateral damage,” “proportionality,” “precautions,” “risk mitigation,” “military objectives,” “presence of civilians,” “human shields,” “immediate threat.”

It is through these categories that the Israeli army is trying to turn its war to eliminate the Palestinian population into a “normal war” – i.e. into a discussion of the procedures by which the violence was supposedly authorized and controlled, with no relation to its effects.

This operation sets up what we might call humanitarian camouflage: not the denial of the violence but its reinterpretation through the language of international humanitarian law, applied to an offensive that is violating the 1948 Genocide Convention. Civilian deaths become “collateral damage,” calculated – the IDF claims – according to the standards of Western militaries; the risk to the........

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